Train drivers' union ASLEF has gone into dispute with the Northern Rail franchise and is to ballot its members, after rejecting a two-year pay offer of 2.7% this year (RPI inflation in April 2014) and 2.5% or RPI next year, whichever is greater.

The company argues that this is a "good offer" "in the current climate". ASLEF points out that it leaves drivers at the company behind those at other train operating companies.

University lecturers are preparing to begin an assessment boycott in protest at attacks on pension provision.

The action, due to start on 6 November, will mean no setting or marking of exams and coursework so long as employers refuse to make concessions. It affects sixty-nine universities, mainly the older “pre-92s”.

Firefighters in England completed a 96 hour national strike over pensions as Solidarity went to press (31 Oct-4 Nov).

Firefighters have now taken more than 10 days of strikes in the increasingly bitter dispute over pensions. Reports from picket lines across England have shown solid levels of support from firefighters and widespread public sympathy.

One voter in four would consider voting UKIP at the next election, according to a poll in the Mail on Sunday (31 October). The poll was published as UKIP looks set to win the Rochester and Strood by-election. Even allowing for bias from a poll commissioned by a paper which routinely feeds hostility to the EU and migration, the level of UKIP support is disturbing.

My first two articles dealing with attempts to organise defence base workers in Australia attempted to highlight the problems with on the ground organising, union arguments over which unions should cover these workers, the workers’ battle for jobs and redundancy payment and most important of all, the horrorible effect of contracting out of services has on the wages and conditions of those workers concerned.

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty, which publishes Solidarity, met for our annual conference on 25-26 October.

The main resolution on perspectives noted the possibility of a growing pay revolt in the next year. Real wages have been squeezed more and longer than ever before on record, and yet union organisation, for all its weaknesses, remains stable.

On Saturday 25 October, up to a million protesters marched to Rome's Piazza San Giovanni in response to the call from CGIL trade union leader Susanna Camusso to support her union's opposition to the coalition goverment of Democratic Party leader Matteo Renzi.

It was largest mass demonstration in Italy for over a decade.

His goverment is in the final stages of introducing legislation to drastically worsen job-security conditions won 40 years ago in mass struggles.